Many people were taken by surprise that Jason opted to release a “human powered search engine” called Mahalo as his latest project. What surprised even more people was that he was being funded with $ 20 Million dollars to do so. Many people love Jason  and his ability to promote ventures of his but like most people when they first heard of the idea thought it was unheard of and it would never get off the ground. But the question does remain is it doable to do a dmoz in 2.0? Test Mahalo yourself. You can find it at mahalo.com.

Because there has already been a human powered search site currently on the web and it is an impressive 600,000 pages. How will Mahalo get the job done. In the past there have been many SEO success stories and one of the biggest is About.com which sold for about $ 410 million dollars in 2005 to the New York Times.

About.com received an SEO manual and they were directed to create a site that was to author a high value of content just like Mahalo is going with his site. About has an estimated 3 to 6 million pages already indexed in Google. But dmoz was not really SEO driven but it made a great big presence in the industry. So much dmoz data was given away and other webmasters put up sites just like it  and if you were luck enough to get a link from dmoz then you had hundreds and hundreds of links all over the web. Dmoz was and is a PR10 which is absolutely terrific.

Today , the most successful SEO site is naturally Wikipedia. They get about 2 percent of outbound traffic from Google. It has been the opinion of some people that SEO is not used as a startup business. Some sites that are using 2.0 are not getting to get social adoption but that they will start to flood the index with a landing page scam or a strange template .

Many people believe that not many users will use Mahalo directly, they may land there by search results but unlike Wikipedia they get natural traffic. He should expect to get some SEO traffic but if he doesn’t then he will have to work something else. But Jason is smart and he will find a way to work it out to his benefit.

Another great challenge that will face Jason is maintenance, it is constant maintenance. You need to create the pages first and then manage to keep them all updated. It you don’t update then your pages are going to die off. Once your pages start to do that then the site goes down. It will cost you some money to do the upkeep because you cannot do it alone. Wikipedia does not really have to worry because their site is basic information on people, historic events, places and some history and since nothing has changed in some ways they don’t have to worry about their pages rotting. It is going to be tough and a lot of hard work. But if Jason has the time and he has thwacking then he will find away.